Seriously? You’re asking that here? And here I am running around this week catching up because of all the time I spent in meatspace with Happy Mutants last week.
Not that I’m suggesting the BBS be any sort of dating service. But it is a great place to find like-minded thinkers who are fun to spend time with, whether online or IRL.
That one gets my vote.
I met my wife through a personal ad placed in The Onion, back when their personals were run by Spring Street Networks. I figured that people who read The Onion would be at least halfway cool and funny (at least back then, in late 2004), so it’d serve as a useful prefilter.
Don’t know what I’d use today, but I suspect I could find some kind of community that presents a decent pool of candidates. My standards haven’t lowered, so much as they’ve broadened since my twenties.
Yep. It’d certainly be my first stop.
Why? How is “where should one go to meet like minded people” not constructive dating advice, especially given @StrawBoss 'a comments around difficulties finding interesting girls?
@chgoliz I exempted BBS from my list because 1) clearly everyone here already knows of BBS and 2) BBS, while a place for relatively “like-minded” folk isn’t really subject-specific as @popobawa4u suggested.
@japhroaig hey, if you’re lucky enough to find a diverse set of folks in meatspace, more power to you! I’m not intending to discourage IRL as a place to start, more the specific “bar scene” that isn’t exactly a hotbed of specific interests. 
As a lady, on the internet, I found his comments less about [quote=“orenwolf, post:109, topic:96611”]
difficulties finding interesting girls
[/quote]
And more about feeling intellectually superior and girls strangely finding him uninteresting.
Sure, absolutely. And that’s why I suggested that “constructive dating advice” in this case might be self-reflection on why dating has been so difficult. I think your impressions are vital for that very reason 
Anyone can decide anything about you at any time, on or off the internet. You or I ultimately don’t know what they have decided or what their rationalization is unless they explicitly tell us.“Mindreading” is never accurate or helpful in any situation.
If you are looking for something, you will find it, every time.There are people wandering around all over the place with all kinds of ideas and rationalizations. Focusing on one set of ideas or one sort of person that you disagree with might keep you from seeing the people in your life that you do agree with or want to find.
It only gets OK Marx from me 
Which one of them is Stop?
Agree with you there. When I was traveling a lot id hit the local joint, which was usually 90%+ other techies travelling as well. In those scenarios conversations would almost always light up.
I have never met someone in a bar that I’ve ever talked to for more than maybe two hours. But I also have no fear just saying, “hey”. If someone doesn’t want to talk, I back off quick and don’t take it personally.
If you ever hear me say, “smile”, you have my permission to borrow @Donald_Petersen 's sledge and use it on me.
And soap. It turns out soap’s important too.
There are difficulties in finding interesting people, but if one thinks about 1) what makes interesting people interesting, 2) what do they do to stay interesting, and 3) where can you find these people doing those things, you can find them. Even if you’re in a titties-and-beer intellectual wasteland (been there), a military town (ditto), some whitebread little suburb (yep, there too), or anywhere else that basically kills the interesting, you still have options if you start with the internet and work from there.
Oh i agree, it is quite…enlightening. I should have linked to some. They do warn you of course that it could turn you into an angry rage monster (paraphrasing) if the result challenges your own cultural bias.
If you really don’t understand then this might be an eye opening thing I’m about to tell you.
People of different levels of education have very different conversations, not just in subject but at a fundamental level. Degrees to which people use critical thinking, lateral thinking, empathy and fallacious logic varies a lot depending on what kind of background they have.
You should speak to more republicans.
This also goes nicely with what was being said upthread about “Being Yourself”. My Self’s a complete jerk, so tests like this can help me not be myself, but be the Self I wish I actually was.
One of those tests certainly made me doubt that i was as free of bias as i previously thought, if someone had told me to my my face what that test told me then i might not have taken it as a constructive learning exercise. Identifying it and accepting it is the first step i suppose and i believe there is some evidence to support the idea that IATs do help to change behaviour.
@enso
@LearnedCoward
Yeah sorry but this can be depressing for me.
The “just be yourself” idea kind of assumes that “yourself” is a good person. I’m standoffish, judgmental, aloof and- so I’m told- very unapproachable. Clearly “myself” isn’t the sort of personality that gets lots of valentines. So when I think about this too deeply I realize that my options are to either accept being forever_alone.jpg or putting on a really good mask. Both options aren’t great.
